While the Internet can provide a tremendous amount of information about a wide variety of subjects, the Internet can also pose dangers, especially for children. Parents want their children to have access to the many educational resources that can be found on the Internet. At the same time, parents want to prevent their children from accessing the many Web sites that contain violence, pornography, and other material inappropriate for children. Even more so, parents want to protect their children from child predators that use the Internet to lure children from chat rooms to in-person meetings.
In 1998, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) was passed to prohibit Web sites from gathering personal information from children under the age of 13 without parental consent. While COPPA is a significant and positive step toward protecting children's privacy when on the Internet, there are many other dangers on the Internet that COPPA fails to address. COPPA does not protect children from viewing inappropriate material on Web sites. COPPA also does not protect children from communicating with strangers that could be child predators on the Internet.
Conventional computer technology provides a few steps that parents can take to protect their children from material and individuals that may be harmful. One type of conventional computer technology for protecting children is blocking software that blocks access to certain sites that have been predetermined as inappropriate or which contain key words, such as profanity or sex-related words. Blocking software comes in different forms, such as stand-alone software packages, resources on the Internet, and as an online service that allows parents to limit access to certain sites and features, such as e-mail, instant messages, or certain content. Popular online services are provided by Internet service providers such as MSN the Microsoft Network® provided by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. In order to determine which sites and content are most appropriate for children, child-specific search engines, ratings, and review sites have been emerging. Search engines and directories yield only those sites that have been determined appropriate for children. Of course, such search engines and blocking software do not automatically protect children from all inappropriate content.
While conventional computer technology can aid parents in controlling the content their child can access on the Internet, the conventional computer technology is not perfect. The blocking software or online services often miss inappropriate sites and block appropriate sites. It would be advantageous for parents and children to communicate about the online controls and to enable parents to customize the online controls for children based on those communications. Therefore, there exists a need for children and parents to communicate regarding the parental controls, with the ability for parents to customize the parental controls based on that communication.